The year before last, I abandoned my plans to assemble a year-end review compilation during the last week of 2012, when I discovered that I had nearly eighty releases to consider. This time, I began work on the 2013 compilation in early December, only to find that the year had enriched my music collection by more than 130 titles. I was dismayed, but I did not abandon the project altogether; I chose instead to make it more manageable by narrowing the scope.

Following the example of a friend of mine, I decided to pull songs only from the singles and EPs I had acquired during the year. This strategy not only reduced the number of releases to forty-six, it also meant that there would be fewer songs per release to consider.

What I ended up with was enough songs to fill two, eleven track compilations, which I titled fuzz and fuzz lite before posting them to Mixcloud for any- and everyone’s listening pleasure.

I have decided to use Mixcloud because it frees me from having to contact each artist to get permission to use a song; Mixcloud pays the artists in a manner similar to the way it’s done in radio. The switch was also meant to make my life easier by allowing me to post players for each compilation (complete with track list) into my blog, but, alas, Mixcloud moved from a flash based to an HTML based widget, which, naturally, WordPress doesn’t support. Until this changes, I can only post links to the compilations and hope that the reader will be sufficiently inspired to click on them.

Track List for fuzz01. “She’s Bleeding From Everywhere” by Ask For Joy from Pins And Needles
This five-song EP is one of my favorite releases of 2013, but having paid $9 for the CD, I was disappointed to discover that it had been mastered from lossy files (MP3s, perhaps).

02. “Faulted” by Miniatures from DIS
These Kiwi expats (now living in Australia) have been featured on this blog before, and I’m happy to say that this is another good effort by them.Bandcamp